On 01/15/2016 10:38 AM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
On Fri, Jan 15, 2016 at 08:48:21PM +0800, Thomas Goirand wrote:
This isn't the first time I'm calling for it. Let's hope this time, I'll
be heard.
Randomly, contributors put their company names into source code. When
they do, then effectively, this tells that a given source file copyright
holder is whatever is claimed, even though someone from another company
may have patched it.
As a result, we have a huge mess. It's impossible for me, as a package
maintainer, to accurately set the copyright holder names in the
debian/copyright file, which is a required by the Debian FTP masters.
I don't think OpenStack is in a different situation to the vast
majority of open source projects I've worked with or seen. Except
for those projects requiring copyright assignment to a single
entity, it is normal for source files to contain an unreliable
random splattering of Copyright notices. This hasn't seemed to
create a blocking problem for their maintenance in Debian. Loooking
at the debian/copyright files I see most of them have just done a
grep for the 'Copyright' statements & included as is - IOW just
ignored the fact that this is essentially worthless info and included
it regardless.
Agree. debian/copyright should be a best effort - but it can only be as
good as the input data available to the packager. Try getting an
accurate debian/copyright file for the MySQL source tree at some point.
(and good luck)
I see 2 ways forward:
1/ Require everyone to give-up copyright holding, and give it to the
OpenStack Foundation.
2/ Maintain a copyright-holder file in each project.
3/ Do nothing, just populate debian/copyright with the random
set of 'Copyright' lines that happen to be the source files,
as appears to be common practice across many debian packages
eg the kernel package
http://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs/main/l/linux/linux_3.16.7-ckt11-1+deb8u3_copyright
"Copyright: 1991-2012 Linus Torvalds and many others"
if its good enough for the Debian kernel package, it should be
good enough for openstack packages too IMHO.
I vote for 3
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